Customer Reviews

Countdown to Spanish : Learn to Communicate in 24 Hours

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Countdown to Spanish is very dense in information and will give you a solid background in Spanish. However, you must devote time to studying it, and limit yourself to one lesson at a time. You will need to spend more than 24 hours of study with this book to learn how to communicate in Spanish. If you are looking for a textbook that is solid in grammar then this book provides one.

An excellent, affordable way to review basic and intermediate grammar and vocabulary! Great for beginners and students who are getting ready to review everything before starting the intermediate level. I thought I knew the basics pretty well, but through this book I discovered a lot of things that I missed in my earlier studies.. Overall, this book helped me immensely!

A couple of years ago I got this book in electronic form and browsed through it for some time. I had the impression it is pretty good so I decided to purchase a paper copy and study through it. Unfortunately, my initial judgment has failed me in this case. This book isn't too good. It's quite bad, really. "With Countdown to Spanish, in just 24 hours your can learn to speak like a native in all sorts of everyday situations" - says the back cover. Yeah right !!

The first part of this book presents the Spanish language for general use, discussing basic vocabulary and grammar. It is the better part of the book, although I don't like the way of presentation used by the author. Instead of showing many examples, she just bombards the reader with grammar rules, discussing pretty complex rules early on. For example, the 5th chapter (1/5 of the way through the book) teaches the Future Perfect and Perfect Conditional tenses - some of the more complex tenses of the language, and that after only a minimal teaching of the simpler topics !

The second part of the book is the really bad one, however. It's a simple categorized dictionary, plumped into the book to bring it to 24 chapters.

What I would expect from a good book that tries to teach you some skill is a thorough set of exercises. There are exercises in this book, but they're a joke. After a long chapter explaining many concepts, the author provides 5-6 trivial questions, usually only on 1/4th of the material taught by the chapter. This is no way to teach.

The book has some nice spots here and there (the chapters on Pronunciation and Asking Questions come to mind), but all in all it's very unhelpful - you can spend your time and money better on other books.

You will never learn the material in this book in a day. You might learn the book in 240 hours if you practice 45 minutes a day for about a year. If you really want to learn Spanish, then I would practice for about 2400 hours.

I never should have believed the title.